On 15 August 1968, Prime Minister John Gorton officially opened the National Library of Australia; the first major construction along the shores of the four-year-old Lake Burley Griffin.

The Library holds press cuttings about the opening. Many superlatives were used in reviews, which largely praised the design and purpose of Australia’s new national showcase and treasure trove.

“Nomads come to rest at last”, proclaimed the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH); “their wanderings going back to 1901” and “at one stage some of the books were stored in a disused morgue and the films in an explosives shed by a quarry”.

The National Library’s years of uncertainty “in the wilderness”, including a short-lived home on Kings Avenue, were finally over, and now the libraries of Australia could concentrate on, as many reported, the “great task ahead”. In a special feature in the SMH, ‘Australia Unlimited 1968’ (pages 67-68), of the Sydney Morning Herald (22 July 1968), the opening of the National Library was seen as the beginning of Canberra becoming “a thriving city”.

“National Library Opens Today” proclaimed the front page of The Canberra Times. A four-page supplement (pp. 27-30) featured advertorials for the builders and designers of the Library and an article describing our new “Storehouse of Knowledge” as “reminiscent in its marbled columns and classical façade of a great and wealthy bank”.

Sir John Overall, the Commissioner of the National Capital Development Commission (now National Capital Authority), wrote that with the opening of the National Library in the “central triangle” and the plans for the new buildings, including an Australian National Gallery and a High Court, Canberra was “an emerging inland metropolis” for the 110,000 Canberrans and the “600,000 and more tourists” who were visiting each year.

Sir Harold White CBE (1905-1992), the first National Librarian, spoke about the Library’s plans to increase the collection by 100,000 books each year, a goal made possible by Legal Deposit, a provision of the Copyright Act (1968) in which a copy of everything published in Australia must also be deposited to the National Library. (The Albany Advertiser, 12 August 1968, page 10.)

Journalists reported on this, and the plans for developing the historic collections to be stored in the “$1 million an acre” eight-acres of space, which included Captain James Cook’s manuscripts and Endeavour journal, the 1297 version of the Magna Carta (now in the Parliament House collection) and 11,000 French Revolution pamphlets. (Financial Review, 16 August and Geelong Advertiser, 12 August 1968.)

“They will swell the already extensive collection of literature, now totalling more than one million volumes. With them comes other treasure for the library – pictures and sketches, maps and manuscripts, photographs and ‘movies’, microfilms and microcopies. …The quantity and range of the material now on file is impressive, though the library still regards the collections… as being in their formative period.” (The Albany Advertiser, 12 August 1968, page 10.)

And swell the National Library of Australia’s collection has through legal deposit, government funding, or donations of their life’s work from artists, writers, academics, bibliophiles, collectors et al.

The Library’s computer network was also being planned. John Balnaves, “principal librarian (bibliographical services)”, said: “"A computer network would enable libraries to give much improved service to scholars and research workers almost immediately…For example, libraries would be able to provide almost instantaneously the titles and authors of books published in a particular language or in a particular place, things which at present they can do only after lengthy research". (The Canberra Times, 13 August 1968, page 7.)